I used the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality to explore whether and to what extent reputation, measured as spotty work history, job-hopping, and previous incarceration, helps to explain why blacks are less likely than Latinos and whites to find work through personal contacts and why the...

Functional theories of reputation imply that individuals’ reputations are tied to their history of behavior. However, indirect evidence suggests that the link between reputation and behavior may be tenuous at best. In three studies we tracked the development of reputations over time among...

If categorical boundaries serve to assist audiences in lumping together like organizations and separating different ones, then does an organization’s reputation also remain similarly bounded? We conceptualize reputation as an assessment of an actor’s ability or quality, but in the...